On October 16th in London, England one of our favorite clients was crowned winner of Oracle’s worldwide Markie award for Metrics that Matter. AGCO Corporation is a Fortune 500 company that manufactures and sells agriculture equipment (I’m talking really, really big tractors) around the world. We’d like to relish in their glory for a few minutes because, dammit, they couldn’t have done it without us. Our client contact, James (who, incidentally, now insists that we call him SirJames) even said so.

“We won! We couldn’t have done it without you guys!”

That isn’t all he said, but I want to hold onto that feeling of vicariously walking down the red carpet and having our name called out, the room erupting in applause, and us winning a coveted gold statue just a little longer. Okay, I’m done.

The truth is, AGCO deserved to win. Specifically, Sir James, Kendra, Peter, and their respective marketing team deserved to win. You see, AGCO is a very large company and has struggled with a common ailment of many large companies. Marketing would generate “leads” (you already know those quotes mean they weren’t necessarily leads, right?) and handed them off to the sales team and their dealers. The sales team and dealers largely ignored them because of the poor quality they experienced with so many of them. James, Kendra, and Peter spent well over a year working to completely revamp the entire lead management process to ensure high-quality leads were being produced and submitted and the right automation was in place to streamline it all–all while continuing to run the existing operation.

While originally looking for a vendor that could provide an online chat solution, AGCO ultimately selected us to provide our full Digital Demand Capture™ service because they saw how central it was to their strategy.

Here’s why:

The Digital Demand Capture service produces sales-ready leads and opportunities on a pay-for-performance basis.

From all marketing campaigns driving people to a web site, it intelligently identifies the potential buyers among all the other site traffic using behavioral analysis.

It dynamically adjusts site content to align with a potential buyer’s motivations and better persuade him or her to take a desired action.

It utilizes web forms, live chat, phone conversations, and even text messaging to ensure a dialogue occurs with each potential buyer.

Where opportunities exist, a complete buyer narrative is created that details the value of the opportunity and what needs to be done to close it.

It integrates with the top marketing automation and CRM platforms (Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, SalesForce, MS Dynamics, Sales Cloud, etc.) to keep data synchronized and relevant for the sales and marketing teams.

It provides the marketing metrics that matter, including things like: what buyer personas and buying stages is each marketing campaign producing, what is the value in opportunities produced by each marketing campaign, how many closed sales resulted from each marketing campaign.

Click to see an actual example of a Digital Demand Capture opportunity.

Click to see an example of aggregate reporting.

While the aggregate metrics were very valuable to AGCO, the individual buyer narratives included with each generated opportunity were even more so. Internal opinions (though interesting they may be) became largely irrelevant to the actual situations, motivations, and concerns of prospective buyers. One-size-fits-all approaches that historically didn’t fit anyone evolved into processes that were able to truly address individual needs.

Groups outside of just sales and marketing adopted the data to better tailor dealer trainings and financing options. Product teams had access to the real-time voice of existing customers as well as competitive customers to learn from.

In short, AGCO was able to get their arms around the individual buyer metrics and as a result now has more control and impact over the aggregate metrics that upper management and shareholders value. Did I mention they also got a really cool Oscar like trophy as well?

Bruce has been in the conversion optimization business for over a decade and an architect of Digital Demand Capture scenarios since 2010. His clients have consistently doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled the results from their marketing campaigns using the Digital Demand Capture™ service. When not improving conversions, Bruce likes to throw his body from planes. Visit www.leadanywhere.com to learn more about Digital Demand Capture.